Is there a Santa Claus? No known species of reindeer can fly. However, there are hundreds of thousands, even millions of species of living organisms yet to be classified. While most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. Since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish & Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with. This is due to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits/second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has .001 seconds to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles/household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles; not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once ever 31 hours, plus feeding etc. So Santa's sleigh must be moving at 650 miles/second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on the earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second. A conventional reindeer can run, TOPS, 15 miles/hour. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-size Lego set (2 lb.); the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 lbs. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see above) could pull 10 TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with 8, or even 9 reindeer. We need 214,200. This increases the payload - not counting the weight of the sleigh to 353,430 tons. This is four times the weight of the ocean-liner Queen Elizabeth!!! 353,00 tons traveling at 650 miles/second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy!!! Per second!!! Each!!! In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within .00426th of a second. Meanwhile, Santa will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity, A 250 lb Santa (seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of this sleigh by 4,315,015 lbs. of force. Therefore, if Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve ... he's dead now. Merry Christmas! Credit to the I fucking love science page where I lifted this.
If there really is a Santa Claus he better be giving fire_johnidzick a big chunk of coal for Christmas.
Yeah, the math is not great. Some families have only one child and the child is a big bully. Also, the guy who wrote it needs a proofreader:
Clearly the author never saw the Santa Claus ,,,,it explains so much of this ! ( : Also anyone who has seen the radio city Xmas spectacular knows that Santa can be in a gazillion places at one time,,,,,,I have to say the author is a troll, most likely a patriot or dolphin fan,,,,!
Yeah and according to NORAD he left my condo in Manila at 11 PM on Christmas Eve. Now for the sake of shits and giggles even though it's now 1PM in the afternoon here for me on Christmas Day the last time I flew home to Las Vegas from Asia I left Manila at 12:15 PM on a Friday , flew to Seoul, Korea , spent 4 hours there and left Seoul at 9 PM on that same Friday night. I then landed in Vegas at 4PM on that very same Friday afternoon so in theory if I could get on a nonstop flight from here in say 6 hours I would be home in time to celebrate Christmas with my family while also celebrating it here in Philippines.
You're leaving out some good basic science there, though. Santa Claus uses an Extra-Dimensional Time Sleigh (EDTS), which does not move using normal physics. Using special relativity, the sleigh utilizes phase distortion to effectively tunnel through space and time. Imagine a piece of cloth, and drawing a line across it, with an A at one end and a B at the other. Well, what the EDTS does is essentially bunch that cloth together so that points A and B are now next to each other. This allows him to traverse the distance between most houses almost instantaneously; the sleigh will appear to teleport from place to place. Santa's sack of presents also contains an extra-dimensional element that allows it to be refilled with presents from the North Pole after each house. Similarly, the EDTS also uses time crystals, which radiate out a distortionary field and effectively stops time. Of course, it's impossible to actually stop time, but it's slowed down to such an extent that the actual passage of time is essentially negligible. This allows Santa to make longer distance trips in his sleigh almost instantly. As for the reindeer, it's actually somewhat of a misunderstood thing. Reindeer cannot fly. That is absurd foolishness. They are covered with special North Pole Bacteria (NPB) that flagellate and allow the reindeer to be propelled through the air in a coordinated forward motion. Santa's sleigh travels at about 30 mph, although it is also equipped with boosters that allow him to reach speeds of nearly 100 mph when he is traveling longer distances, such as between continents. It's unnecessary with the time distortion, but it does cut down on the boredom factor. Santa may only work one day each year, but for him it is experienced as millions of years because of the time distortion. Brutally falling down chimney after chimney, being immolated by flames, massive amounts of sugar and dairy from all the milk and cookies- that's why he's a saint. Now I know you're probably going to tell me that he'd die from all the falling, fire, and saturated fat, but Santa has special nano materials inside of his body that allow him a very high degree of regenerative capacity. If you're familiar with comic books, you might know of a character named "Wolverine" - he's loosely based on Santa Claus. That's why Wolverine has metal claws- Santa Claus. I hope that this clears up some of your confusion.
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/physics.asp Origins: We don't have anything to add to this piece, but as a perennial Christmas item which has circulated as netlore for several years it merits inclusion here. This tongue-in-cheek scientific analysis of Santa's toy delivery mechanisms is believed to have originated with an article published in (the now defunct) Spy magazine at the end of 1990, although some readers claim to have encountered the Internet prior to its publication in Spy. This piece has proved popular enough that others have tried their hands at writing rebuttals to it, and some sites have archived collections of rebuttals. http://www.chainreactionbicycles.com/santaclaus.htm This analysis can be traced back as far as 1990, and has been attributed to a lot of different people. It's found all over the 'web, with many different "original" authors claiming it as their own. It awaits the writing of a better conclusion, however, since we all know that Santa Claus is not only very much alive, but does, in fact, accomplish everything set out above. --Mike-- Last updated 09/09/07
